All posts by Nivedita Menon

Fifteen people have been trapped in an illegal rat-hole mine in East Jaintia Hills in Meghalaya since December 13, 2018.

Three helmets are all that have been found so far. Authorities were callous enough to presume the miners dead on the very day of the accident. The district administration wrote to the National Disaster Response Force on December 13 asking for help in recovering the “dead bodies”.

But as citizens, we are all equally responsible for a pervasive national culture of violence, exploitation and abuse of power. Abhineet Mishra delivers the shock to our conscience that is long overdue.

We, the undersigned individuals, women’s rights activists and allies of the women’s movements, are opposed to the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2018 in its present form. We appeal to the Members of Rajya Sabha to completely withdraw the Bill and significantly re-draft it in the interest of Muslim women.

The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017, was passed by the Lok Sabha on December 28, 2017 and is pending before the Rajya Sabha. This Bill was not referred to a Select Committee as urged by the members of Rajya Sabha, but the Union Cabinet incorporated three amendments based on the issues raised by the Opposition. It included the provision of bail when the wife appears before the Magistrate, allowing only the aggrieved woman and her relatives (by blood or marriage) to file a complaint, and making the offence compoundable. Owing to severe opposition to this Bill in the Rajya Sabha, the Union Cabinet issued the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Ordinance on September 19, 2018, which criminalised the pronouncement of triple talaq (or talaq-e-bidat) with punishment of up to 3 years of imprisonment and with fine.

We are writing on behalf of Muslim women from across the country and women’s groups to oppose this Bill, which is arbitrary, excessive, and violative of fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Overall, if this Bill is passed it would make Muslim women more vulnerable to violence, as well as harm their economic, household and social security.

We, the undersigned faculty and student members of Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH) who have been elected by the faculty and students of JNU to ensure gender justice in the university (2017), are shocked by the news report on the recommendations of the Internal Complaints Committee’s (ICC) for a specific case. The report published in Indian Express (13.12.2018) states that the ICC found the complaint a frivolous one after inquiry and consequently has recommended that the complainant be completely debarred from entering JNU Campus, her degree should be withdrawn, and that she should never be allowed to take up any course or employment in JNU.

As per the ICC Rules and Procedure, Rule No. 11 states the “Action against frivolous complaint” in order “to ensure that the provisions for the protection of employees and students from sexual harassment do not get misused”. It further states “If the ICC concludes that the allegations made were false, malicious or the complaint was made knowing it to be untrue, or forged or misleading information has been provided during the inquiry, the complainant shall be liable to be punished as per the provisions of sub- regulations (1) of regulations 10, if the complainant happens to be an employee and as per sub-regulation (2) of that regulation, if the complainant happens to be a student. However, the mere inability to substantiate a complaint or provide adequate proof will not attract attention against the complainant. Malicious intent on the part of the complainant shall not be established without an inquiry, in accordance with the procedure prescribed, conducted before any action is recommended”. Continue reading JNU GSCASH statement on ICC punishments for complainant→

We, the undersigned faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University express our shock and outrage at the extreme penalties recommended against a doctoral student for bringing a sexual harassment complaint against her teacher.

According to a report in the Indian Express (dated 13 December 2018), JNU’s Internal Complaints Committee (ICC) has decided to punish a student for allegedly filing a ‘false’ sexual harassment complaint against a teacher in what it has deemed to be a ‘frivolous’ complaint. While we are not privy to either the details of the complaint or the justification the ICC has for arriving at this conclusion — rather than simply noting the failure to substantiate a complaint— we find the severity of the penalties imposed extremely troubling.

On the night of November 12th 2018, more than fifty people from Sittilingi, a village in Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu, made their way back home from Dharmapuri Government Medical College Hospital with the body of a 16-year-old Adivasi (Malaivasi) girl. The girl had been raped on November 5th by two drunk men, and had died in the hospital five days later – a death that her family have described as linked to blatant police negligence, beginning with their refusal to file an FIR, and involving the questionable role of the Child Welfare Committee (CWC) in Dharmapuri. Manjunathan*, a resident of Sittilingi, says that on November 12th, around ten police vehicles and 100 policemen had followed the girl’s funeral procession through the village, all the way to the graveyard. “Till now we have never seen the police,” Manjunathan attests, “now suddenly, since the day of the protest, they have remained in the village, especially at the junction, harassing people.”

If you key in “remote island” on Google, most of the news stories it throws up are about an unfortunate and very dead young man named John Allen Chau. If you type in “remote Indian island”, Google will take you immediately to North Sentinel Island.

We are all, by now, familiar with sad tale of John Allen Chau and his ill-fated voyage to Sentinel Island. A young evangelical from the United States, Chau was – apparently from a very tender age – fired with zeal to convert to Christianity the natives of a very specific island in the Bay of Bengal: viz., North Sentinel Island in the Andaman & Nicobar archipelago.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion

Austen’s words, a searing commentary on how patriarchy controls the narrative, remains relevant today despite tenacious efforts by women to wrest authorial control from men and narrate our own stories. Even as the struggle to find one’s voice and to be heard continues, we might also ask ourselves what we will be left with after we have successfully challenged male authority and supremacy in our stories, the idea of heroes and villains, of chaste wives and women of disreputable characters. In the moment of triumph, is there also a need of introspection? The MeToo movement, in India and elsewhere, opens our world(s) up to these and many other questions that do not have easy or ready answers. A standard reply, reproduced in several platforms when questions like ‘why now’ or ‘what next’ are raised is illuminating of the problem societies face when women tell stories: “For now, we should just listen to the women who want to speak up.” It not only represents the struggle to tell our stories on our own terms but also tell them without a fixed agenda or plan.